Managing security certificates and the distribution thereof among Wireless Sensor Network (“WSN”) nodes is a challenging task for an enterprise which may be, on a monthly basis, installing millions of WSN nodes among thousands of customer sites. Each WSN node must be provided a security certificate that allows it to function on its secure network, but disallows general eavesdropping by non-network nodes. As known in the art, the security certificate facilitates secure communications over a network between the WSN nodes and/or other network nodes. In this regard, the security certificate is an electronic document that uses a digital signature to bind a public key with an identity—information such as the name of a person or a business organization, an address, and so forth. The security certificate can be used to verify that a public key belongs to the person or business organization.
For a large corporation, it is imperative that generic security certificates not be used since they would logically be widely distributed and present serious security threats to a new network. Also, programming of security certificates in the field using wireless transmission to a WSN node immediately after first power-up is dangerous because of potential eavesdropping.
Therefore, the safest place to program security certificates into WSN nodes is at the factory. In this case, exact pre-staging of all WSN nodes for a given installation is required many weeks or even months prior to their actual installation. The pre-staging would require determining: which WSN nodes are to be disposed in a particular building; at what location within the building each WSN node is to be deployed; and programming each WSN node specific for the respective intended location in the building. This staging is very inconvenient and impractical in scenarios in which a relatively large number of WSN nodes (e.g., 10,000 WSN nodes) are to be installed for at least one enterprise at locations within a plurality of buildings (e.g., 500 buildings). It may even be impossible if the installer is a third party who maintains a running inventory of WSN hardware.
Existing practice relies on short-time use of default security certificates, Universal Serial Bus (“USB”) dongles, on-site pin programming, and other similar methods. In these cases, the WSN system may be exposed to real security threats. Additionally or alternatively, the installation of the WSN nodes is physically inconvenient and/or requires a relatively long amount of time to complete.